This study examined a novel learning environment in one kindergarten classroom with 90% Spanish-speaking ELLs. The design combined the interactive whiteboard platform and a student-centered, constructionist pedagogy to structure cooperative tasks, academic language and semiotic formations through the engineering design process within a…

Mixed languages like Media Lengua incorporate grammar from one source language (here, Quichua) but lexicon from another (here, Spanish). Due to their linguistic profile, they provide a unique window into bilingual language usage and language representation. Drawing on sociolinguistic, structural and psycholinguistic perspectives, the current…

This column is a review of three areas of interest to Texas ELAR educators: the ELAR/SLAR TEKS revision, recent news from the Texas Education Agency, and the status of several bills relating to assessment. Included is a summary of the past two years of the ELAR/SLAR TEKS revision process and information about next steps in that process.

The poem "Ritmos negros del Perú" by Afro-Peruvian writer Nicomedes Santa Cruz recovers Afro-Peruvian history and agency through the retelling of the journey of a mythical grandmother. Through the retelling of her story, the poet claims blackness and African roots as pillars of Peruvian culture. In so doing, Santa Cruz opens the door not…

Native speakers seamlessly marshal morphological resources to create new words, displaying striking consistency even where multiple options are available, as when a stem contains a phonological alternation. This is true even when these options appear to be idiosyncratically applied in existing words. For example, in derived words, the alternation…

Purpose: This longitudinal study investigated the emergence of English tense marking in young (Spanish-English) dual language learners (DLLs) over 4 consecutive academic semesters, addressing the need for longitudinal data on typical acquisition trajectories of English in DLL preschoolers. Method: Language sample analysis was conducted on 139…

This study tests the theoretical predictions regarding effects of increasing task complexity (Robinson, 2001a, 2001b, 2007, 2010; Robinson & Gilabert, 2007) for second language (L2) pronunciation. Specifically, we examine whether more complex tasks (a) lead to greater incidence of pronunciation-focused language-related episodes (LREs) and (b)…

This study explores the second language (L2) acquisition of a segment that exists in learners' first language (L1) and in their L2 but that differs in its phonetic realization and allophonic patterning in the two languages. Specifically, this research tracks development in one aspect of the production of the alveolar lateral /l/ in the L2 Spanish…

Continuity and discontinuity are sometimes marked in discourse by means of connectives. This study tested for the first time whether causal and concessive connectives induce expectations of emotional continuity and discontinuity, respectively. Using a novel double-task paradigm, participants first listened to an antecedent clause with a causal or…

A growing percentage of low-income children in the United States come from Spanish-speaking homes and are dual language learners (DLLs). Recent research shows that bilingual children, compared to monolinguals, have enhanced executive functioning (EF), a set of foundational cognitive skills that predict higher social-emotional competence and…

In research on language development by bilingual children, the early language environment is commonly characterized in terms of the relative amount of exposure a child gets to each language based on parent report. Little is known about how absolute measures of child-directed speech in two languages relate to language growth. In this study of…

This article presents a basic interpretive qualitative study that examined how two students, a dominant Spanish speaker (Joel) and a dominant English speaker (Carter) used languages during their microinteractions in pair work in a dual language kindergarten classroom. The purpose of this study was to understand the relationship between language…

This article will discuss women's writing in the Ladino Zionist-literary periodical, El Maccabeo, during early twentieth century Thessaloniki. We will sketch the writers' profiles, and examine their goals and the literary means used to realize them. These indices will help us evaluate women's place in shaping Thessalonikian Jewry in general, the…

This article claims that Freire's work offers an important ground for a potential theory of intercultural ethics and, for that purpose, examines his ideas at different levels: (1) the ontological; (2) the ideological; (3) the political; (4) languages and languaging; and (5) cultural identity and diversity. Freire never used the word…

We used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate whether Spanish-English bilinguals preactivate form and meaning of predictable words. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., "The student is going to the library to borrow a..."), followed by the predictable word ("book"), a word that was form-related…